20 May

Posted at 14:42h in Competency Nine, Competency Two, Courses, GPCI Competencies, Grant Readiness, Grant Training Series, Grant Writing, Grants 201, How-To, Julie Asse, GPC, Julie Assel, Need & Need Statements, Uncategorized

    Grants 201: The Power of Partnerships Session 4 of the Grants 201 Series Working together with other nonprofits to achieve greater impact (e.g. shared services, mergers, joint programming, etc.) Partnerships and collaboration are strategic alliances between nonprofits that are intended to achieve greater impact than any organization could...

03 May

Posted at 17:50h in Competency Nine, Thomas Assel, GPC, Writing
May is a month of growth. Trees leaf out more fully and flowers bloom. The temperature rises without being sweltering. We slip the cold bonds of winter and the chaotic weather of early spring, and we breathe deeply of air redolent with the fragrance of blossoms and freshly mown grass. I do, at least until my allergies cause my sinuses to shut tighter than a 100-words-or-less organizational description. As spring’s warmth sets in, we may clean out some of the clutter we accumulated during the long winter. Yes, May is a good month for decluttering our living spaces, and it’s a good month to declutter our writing. By paring down our writing to its essentials, we can be much more effective as grant writers. We can actually grow by shrinking. And not only can we reduce the physical space our writing occupies, but we can also reduce the effort needed to read it and understand it.

27 Apr

Posted at 14:15h in Competency Nine, Competency Two, Courses, GPCI Competencies, Grant Readiness, Grant Training Series, Grant Writing, Grants 201, How-To, Julie Asse, GPC, Julie Assel, Need & Need Statements, Uncategorized

  Grants 201: Needs Assessment & Strategic Plans Session 3 of the Grants 201 Series Needs assessments conducted broadly in the community and specifically by an organization are valuable tools for all individuals who write grants. They help the writer use facts to describe the challenges experienced by...

27 Jul

Posted at 11:22h in Competency Nine, Thomas Assel, GPC, Writing
Grant writers often have to fit lots of content into character, word, or page limits. We always have to worry about keeping a reader’s attention. One way we condense content is by using a series, a list of three or more items separated by commas. One way to confuse readers and lose their attention is to write a series that doesn’t make sense. This blog post will help you avoid that so you can write as clearly and concisely as possible.

01 Jun

Posted at 13:57h in Competency Nine, Equity, Maryam Gilmore
Unless you’re a one-person show at your agency, you’re likely dependent on someone else within the organization to provide you with whatever information you need to write a grant (e.g. data, service updates, etc.). Getting that information is oftentimes the most challenging part of our jobs as grant professionals. Once we do receive the information, it’s part of our job as grant professionals to use it strategically to build a strong, hopefully award-winning grant proposal.

26 May

Posted at 21:55h in Competency Nine, Thomas Assel, GPC, Writing
Parallelism: Lining up your lists to avoid throwing your reader a curveball. We’re grant writers. We often have to fit lots of content into character, word, or page limits. We always have to worry about keeping a reader’s attention. One way we condense content is by using a series, a list of three or more items separated by commas. One way to confuse readers and lose their attention is to write series that don’t make sense. This blog post will help you avoid that so you can write as clearly and concisely as possible.

16 May

Posted at 20:49h in Competency Nine, Michele Ryan, Narrative, Writing
Like many of you, school closures due to the COVID-19 pandemic have placed me in the - let’s be honest - not entirely welcome position of balancing a full-time career with my new role of homeschool teacher. I naively and, looking back on it, pompously believed that this would be a piece of cake. I have teenagers, not small children who demand constant attention. They are good students. How hard can it be? Hard. Harder than I thought possible.

11 May

Posted at 08:22h in Competency Nine, Narrative, Tracey Diefenbach, GPC, Writing
You are knee deep in a large government grant proposal and… The executive director calls you on the way to another meeting and quickly ambles off a new strategy the agency will be embarking on that must be included in the proposal. The finance person sends you an email with three new expenses to include in the budget. As you are leaving a meeting with the evaluation team, you are told about a new assessment tool the agency will be implementing…

04 May

Posted at 11:28h in Competency Nine, Maryam Gilmore
Many funders see far more applications each funding cycle than their dollars can feasibly reach, forcing them to give careful consideration to how they wish to accomplish their respective missions. Even if your organization is doing amazing, life-changing things for the population it serves, if you fail to articulate those amazing things in a way that convinces the holder of funds to invest in you, you could be missing out on funding.